Chapter 10 Mik #2
He stood in front of me and pulled his shirt over his head and I saw his body for the second time, but this time I was allowed to look. The breadth of his shoulders. The scar on his collarbone. The bruise on his ribs, faded now to yellow and green. He was imperfect and beautiful and real.
"Your turn," he said.
I pulled my shirt off. I felt exposed in a way that had nothing to do with skin. He looked at me and his expression softened into something almost reverent, and he reached out and touched the scar on my forearm, the one from a skate blade in Chelyabinsk, running his thumb along it lightly.
"You're shaking," he said.
"Yes."
"We can stop."
"Do not stop."
What followed was not careful or controlled or any of the things I had trained myself to be.
Cole kissed me and I kissed him back and his hands were on my skin, palms flat against my stomach, fingers spread wide like he was trying to touch as much of me as possible.
The contact was a shock. Not because it was unexpected but because my body responded to it with a violence that frightened me.
Every nerve ending I had spent years deadening came back online at once, and the sensation was so overwhelming that I made a sound against his mouth that I did not recognize as my own.
"Easy," he murmured. "I've got you."
He pressed me back and we were chest to chest in the amber light of his bedroom and his skin was warm and smooth and real.
I put my hands on him because I needed proof that this was happening.
My palms on his ribs, feeling them expand with each breath.
My fingers on the scar at his collarbone, tracing the ridge of it.
His stomach tensed under my touch and I felt the muscles contract and I thought: this is what it feels like to touch someone you want.
Not a body in a dark room. A person. This person.
He guided me to the bed. We fell onto it together and his weight settled over me and the pressure of him, the full length of his body against mine, was so good that my hips moved without my permission, pressing up against him, seeking friction that I needed the way I needed air.
"Tell me what you want," he said. His mouth was on my neck, my jaw, the hollow below my ear. His hand was at the waistband of my jeans and his fingers were tracing the line of skin just above it, back and forth, patient and maddening. "Anything you want. Just tell me."
"Everything." The word came out raw. "I want everything. I don't know how to do this but I want everything."
"Then we'll do everything. Slow."
He was not slow. He was thorough, which is different. He undid my jeans with steady hands and pulled them off and then his were gone and we were in our boxers and he looked at me the way a man looks at something he has been thinking about for a long time and is finally allowed to see.
"God, Mik." His voice was rough. "You are so fucking beautiful."
No one had ever said that to me. Not in any language. The word landed on my skin like a hand and I felt it everywhere.
He kissed down my chest. My sternum, my ribs, the flat plane of my stomach.
His mouth was hot and deliberate and I could feel him cataloging my responses the way I cataloged hockey footage, adjusting his approach based on what made me inhale sharply and what made me arch off the mattress.
When he reached the waistband of my boxers he looked up at me, asking without words, and I lifted my hips in answer.
He pulled them down. The cool air hit my skin and then his hand was on me and I stopped thinking.
I had been touched before. In dark rooms in cities whose names I didn't bother to learn, by men whose faces I couldn't see.
Quick, functional transactions that I endured because my body had needs and ignoring them indefinitely was not sustainable.
Those encounters had nothing to do with what was happening now.
Those encounters were maintenance. This was Cole Briggs wrapping his hand around me and stroking slowly, watching my face, learning my rhythm with the same intuitive intelligence he brought to reading a hockey play.
"Good?" he said.
The sound I made was answer enough. He smiled and lowered his mouth and I felt the wet heat of his tongue and my hand went to his hair and gripped and I said something in Russian that I would not be translating.
He took his time. He was patient where I needed patience and firm where I needed to be pulled out of my own head, and when the pleasure built to a pitch that made my vision blur, he slowed down and brought me back and then built it again, and the cycle of it was so intense that my whole body was shaking.
"I want to feel you," I said. "All of you. Please."
He pulled off and reached for the nightstand. I heard a drawer open and close. He came back with what he needed and settled between my legs and the look on his face was serious and tender and completely focused on me.
"If anything doesn't feel right, you tell me. We stop. No questions."
"Yes."
"I need to hear you say it."
"If anything doesn't feel right, I will tell you and we stop."
"Good."
What followed was slow. Careful. His fingers first, one and then two, and the stretch was unfamiliar and strange and then suddenly not strange at all but something else entirely, something that sent a pulse of heat through my core that made me gasp.
He watched my face the whole time, reading me, and when he found the angle that made my back arch he pressed there again and I heard myself moan and did not care.
"Ready?" he whispered.
"Yes."
He pushed into me and we both went still. The fullness was overwhelming. Not painful but enormous. He held himself there, forehead pressed to mine, breathing hard, giving me time to adjust.
"You feel incredible," he said against my mouth. "You feel like you were made for me."
I pulled him deeper. He took the cue and started to move.
Slow at first, a rhythm we had to find together the way we'd found our rhythm on the ice, both of us adjusting, learning, reading each other's signals.
When it clicked, when the angle and the pace aligned, the pleasure was so acute that I made a sound that came from somewhere I didn't know I had.
Something broken open and raw and honest.
He moved faster. I moved with him. My hands were on his back, his shoulders, pulling him closer, and his mouth was on my neck and his breath was ragged and the sounds he was making were wrecked and beautiful and I was causing them.
I was the reason Cole Briggs sounded like that and the knowledge was its own kind of ecstasy.
"Mik. God. I'm close."
"Don't stop."
He shifted his weight and wrapped his hand around me and stroked in time with his thrusts and the dual sensation collapsed whatever was left of my composure.
I came hard, with his name in my mouth and his body in mine and eleven years of nothing turning into everything in the space of a single, shattering minute.
He followed seconds later. I felt him shudder and press deep and groan against my shoulder and the sound of it, the vulnerability of it, this man coming apart because of me, with me, was the most intimate thing I had ever experienced.
We lay there afterward. Breathing. His weight on me. The amber light making shadows on the ceiling. My heartbeat gradually returning from whatever orbit it had achieved.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"I think so."
"You think so?"
I turned my head to look at him. He was on his side, facing me, his hair wrecked and his eyes soft and a mark on his neck that I had put there and did not remember putting there.
"I have never done that with someone who knew my name," I said. "Every time before was anonymous. Intentionally. A body in a room. No names. No eye contact. No staying."
His expression shifted. Something moved behind his eyes that was not pity but was close to grief. Grief for the version of me that had lived like that.
"And now?" he said.
"Now I know your name and your address and the sound you make when you finish. And I am not sure I can go back to anonymous after this."
He reached across the space between us and laced his fingers through mine. Our hands rested on the mattress between our bodies, linked, and the simplicity of it was more intimate than anything that had come before.
"You don't have to," he said. "Go back."
"I know."
"Mik?"
"Yes?"
"Stay tonight."
I should have said no. Every instinct I had built over eleven years was screaming at me to get up, get dressed, go home. Staying was dangerous. Staying was evidence.
"Okay," I said.
He pulled the blanket over both of us and turned off the lamp. In the dark, he moved closer. Not pressing. Just near. His breathing slowed first, the way it always did, because Cole Briggs fell asleep the way he did everything else, with decision and without apology.
I lay awake for a while. Not from anxiety. From something else. A feeling I did not have a word for in either language. A stillness that was not empty but full. The kind of quiet that exists in the center of something rather than at its edge.
For eleven years, the locked room in my chest had held a single truth: wanting was the thing that destroyed you. I had built my entire life around that truth. Organized it. Fortified it. Made it load-bearing.
And now I was lying in a bed in Virginia-Highland with a man's hand in mine and his breath on my shoulder, and the locked room was open, and the truth inside it was different than I remembered.
Wanting had not destroyed me.
Hiding had.
I fell asleep holding Cole's hand. I did not count the seconds. I did not set an alarm. For the first time in eleven years, I let the routine go and trusted that the morning would come regardless of whether I was braced for it.
It was the second best sleep of my life.
The first was Carolina.